The Hearts of Stars
by StarlightSkies18
Summary: Crowley loves Aziraphale like he loves the stars: eternally, wholly, completely. He decides to ask a question they both know the answer to, under the heavens he shaped so very long before. Aziraphale/Crowley, established relationship and all that. Rated for brief language and implied physical intimacy. TV series-compliant. Find it under the same title on AO3.


"You still haven't said where you're spiriting me off to," Aziraphale says in the misty blue twilight as they make their way up yet another grassy knoll. Crowley is several paces ahead of him, looking bizarrely at ease in the untamed, rolling hills of English countryside that surround them.

"And that's the seventh time you've asked, angel," Crowley answers mildly, pocketing his sunglasses but not slowing his pace. "It's just a bit further on."

"Exactly," Aziraphale huffs as they summit another hill, "exactly _what_ is just a bit further on?"

But Crowley makes no answer. Instead, he hefts the basket he's carrying further onto one narrow shoulder and continues to traipse along the crest of the ridge as if he's been there his whole immortal life.

They walk on in silence – or, rather, Crowley walks while Aziraphale trots after him with some difficulty, and the only sound between them is Aziraphale's occasional muttered disapproval as he stumbles over a wayward stone or a thatch of particularly thick grass in his path.

The twilight has deepened to the cusp of night by the time Crowley stops, and Aziraphale almost runs straight into him. Crowley isn't looking at him, though; instead, he's staring upward, with a soft kind of reverence on his face, just barely visible in the dim, dewy light. Aziraphale follows his gaze, and his eyes come to rest on a bright, winking spot that stands out against the dark canvas of the moonless sky. He casts a glance at their surroundings, and is surprised to find that he can see fields stretching for miles below, a thick treeline bordering one side of the cluster of hills where they stand. It is easily the highest point in the area. He can even make out the faint glimmer of purpling dusklight glancing off the sea, far in the distance.

The sweet scent of wildflower grasses and fresh dew assails him as he takes a deep, centering breath in the indigo evening.

"Will you tell me where you've brought me to, or shall I take a guess?" he says mildly. He'd place their surroundings somewhere in southern England – but then, he'd never been particularly good with directions. They could just as easily have ended up in Norfolk for all he knew; travel time wasn't a good indicator with Crowley's driving.

"Help me with this, will you?" Crowley says by way of reply, holding out the soft, flannel blanket in his hands.

_Ah. So that's what was in the basket,_ Aziraphale thinks, wordlessly taking two corners and pulling the fabric taut. They spread it over the least jagged piece of hillside they can find, and settle themselves as comfortably as they can manage. Crowley tugs the basket towards him, and perhaps it's a minor miracle or even simply conscientious forethought on his part when he pulls out a bottle as well. He passes it to Aziraphale, who squints at the label.

"Crowley, weren't you saving this one for something?" he asks, running a thumb over the smooth label which spells out cheerfully, _Viña Tondonia, Cosecha de 1995_. It's supposed to be a lovely vintage, he recalls, and Crowley had miraculously managed to get his hands on a bottle before they were released, nearly two decades after the grapes had been harvested. He's fond of Spanish reds; as a matter of fact, they both are. They'd been drinking them together since somewhere around 1,100 B.C., after all.

"I figured I could get my hands on another, if I wanted," he says smoothly, but there is something else there underneath his collected tone, which lingers at the edges of his words and in the unusual, tight rise of his shoulders. They don't discuss it. Instead, Crowley hands him a newly materialized glass, and Aziraphale pours them both a generous helping.

They sit in comfortable quiet, and once upon a year not so very long ago, Aziraphale might have been startled away by this silence between them, but now he knows all the better. They are content this way, and have settled into the easy domesticity that comes with six thousand-some odd years spent adjusting to one another before the catharsis of spilling their respective immortal souls out to one another. It had taken getting used to, that unsettling rawness as they each gazed into the astral matter of the other, no longer bounded by walls of flesh and blood or by bitten-back, unspoken things that longed so deeply to be said.

Aziraphale has learned Crowley inside and out, as surely as he knows himself. And because of this, he knows he can't push Crowley to say whatever it is that he's brought them both out here to say, so he purses his lips, and contents himself with gazing skyward. It is, after all, very pretty.

A multitude of mottled colors streaks through the sky, deep navy and violet of the night encroaching on the cashmere golds and heaven-spun silvers that make up the Milky Way galactic disc. Deep down somewhere in his angelic soul, Aziraphale feels a stirring of awe as he gazes up at the Universe in all its great vastness. She'd made it so big, and them so very, insignificantly small. Physical space was never a defining trait of angels and demons, and the volume that each liked to occupy depended solely on the being in question. Aziraphale knows, however, that he is but a single, miniscule cog in the wheelwork of Her great creation, and he considers himself extraordinarily lucky that the teeth of his existence slot together so perfectly with Crowley's. He often wonders if that was how She had made them to be – soulmates, intended, destined for one another, to claim one of many mortal terms created for such a rare occasion. And though he would never dare to ask Her, Aziraphale feels vehemently and irrefutably that he is right.

But he does not say any of this. Instead, he ponders the heavens as they swirl above, and picks out the glimmering speck from before, bright on the horizon where the last vestiges of milky periwinkle still cling to existence.

"I do believe that's a planet, if I'm not mistaken?" Aziraphale has never been good at this naming of bright things in the distant void. He has never been good at naming things close to him, either, never good at calling them what they are.

"Jupiter," Crowley says in reply, swirling the wine in his glass like those thick, obscuring clouds that churn about one another in a great, red storm-spot. "If you look hard, you can make out a few of the Galilean moons. Bit of a nutter, old Galileo. Good taste in wine, though." So Aziraphale looks, and there they are, three pinpricks orbiting an infinitesimally small point in the sprawling cosmos. They have no need for telescopes or binoculars, being as they are, and he's never liked them to begin with; it is so much simpler to see what is right in front of you, unaided, unobscured, unchanged.

He drains his glass, allowing the heady taste to flood his mouth, and keeps his head tilted, searching the sky above.

"Tell me about them. About the stars," Aziraphale says, and Crowley's sigh, soft as the downy charcoal of his wings, is not one of sadness but of things loved and lost, a sigh of old friends who clasp hands after a long, aching absence, of beauty that has turned to bittersweet memory.

"Which ones?" Crowley asks, and Aziraphale smiles in spite of himself.

"All of them. Tell me about the ones you made."

Crowley sips his wine thoughtfully, and Aziraphale shifts closer to him so that he can rest his head against the red giant tangles of Crowley's hair. It's started to grow out again, and he does so hope that Crowley will leave it be this time. He thinks of a time when this would have been impossible, when he was allowed to look but not touch, and he so longed to run his hands through the vibrant, silken cascades. He thinks of a time when he could never have asked about the time Before, when Crowley would have shut that part of himself away even more tightly for fear that he might begin to come apart, stitch by stitch.

And Crowley points out the Summer Triangle and the Swan and Eagle that soar through the Milky Way, and Aziraphale asks about the Centaur and the Scorpion, whose jeweled vermillion eye (_Antares_, he remembers) is his favorite in the whole summertime sky. Crowley tells him how the he pleaded with the ancient Grecian astronomers to name it something better than "Mars, Version Two" (as if "Anti-Mars" was any better), and they laugh until their sides burn with the sweet ache of long-awaited jubilation, and he loves it even more. He loves Crowley so deeply that it hurts in this pleasure-painful way, so deeply that he fears he will never find the proper words.

"I didn't have the heart to tell them that I'd no idea what a dolphin was when I was floating about up there popping stars in and out of existence, so I let them think what they wanted," Crowley says eventually, tracing the little arc of Delphinus with one finger where it glitters next to Altair.

He leans away for a moment to pour himself another glass of wine, and he holds his hand out expectantly for the second, but Aziraphale shakes his head, feeling a fond smile cross his lips. Crowley shrugs in that loose and sinuous way of his, and says: "Have I told you about Andromeda?"

"Not yet, my dear, but I suspect you will," Aziraphale replies, and Crowley does. He spins stories of the great fixtures of the cosmos, tells of the star-matter in his hands as he chiseled raw gas and dust into grandiose, lustrous sculptures that have died and given birth and died again in an endless cycle of destruction and creation. There is pain in him, yes, but pride, too, and Aziraphale loves these parts of him just as he loves the sum of them.

Aziraphale watches him, studies the way Crowley's severe profile carves out a familiar, comforting darkness against the star-clad sky. When he looks more closely, though, he realizes that the space Crowley occupies isn't darkness after all. Light emanating from the distant nuclear forges that Crowley once helped to build so long ago has amalgamated in slivers of luminescence that collect here and there across his skin: the bridge of his nose, fine cheekbones, well-lined brow that is (for once) worry free, thin and often-loved lips, eyes that glow with a supernatural radiance even in the dimness of the night. Aziraphale looks at him, and suddenly finds that he has forgotten how to breathe.

It is evident that Crowley can feel Aziraphale's stare fixed on him, because he finally tears his own gaze away from his beloved Universe and meets Aziraphale's eyes. With the Milky Way stretched overhead, its infinite points of light affixed in an ethereal halo about Crowley's head, Aziraphale thinks he has never looked more perfect and holy than now.

"You know," Crowley says quietly, and Aziraphale suspects that this is what he has come here to say. "There was a time I despised you. It seems silly to say it now, but it's the truth."

Aziraphale raises his eyebrows, unable to mask his surprise. He searches for the proper words, plucking them slowly, one at a time, from the recesses of his brain.

"And what changed your mind?"

"I don't think I ever did. Change my mind, that is. I despised you because there you were, this insufferably, _ineffably_ lovable being whom I couldn't not love. I hated that I loved you for such a long time," he admits, speaking the words delicately as if each one of them might break as it tumbles from his lips. "No, nothing changed my mind."

Aziraphale waits, unable to grasp exactly what he's getting at. And he waits some more.

Finally: "The more time I spent with you, the more I realized that it wasn't going to go away. I realized that it wasn't you I hated." He leaves the last part of the sentence unspoken, because it doesn't need to be. They both know what it is, why even now Crowley embraces six thousand long years of bitterness and allows enmity to seduce him. They are old friends, they and he, older than the billowing nebulae above them.

"When I Fell," Crowley says at last, "it took everything from me." It is clear that it burdens him to say even this much, and Aziraphale puts a hand out reflexively to grip his shoulder.

"Crowley, you don't have to—"

"Yes, I _do_," he snaps, though he makes no motion to push Aziraphale's hand away. "You need to know this," Crowley says, a bit more quietly, and Aziraphale feels wisplike fingers come up to tangle with his own.

"When I Fell," he says again, "I knew I'd never be whole again. I could feel the gaping place inside me where there used to be _something_, and I knew that something didn't exist anymore. I wasn't me, I was…changed. It didn't matter, I told myself. I'd make the best of it, and I'd be fine." He draws in a breath.

"And then you came along. You and your naivety and your do-gooding, and I wanted so badly to hate you but I _couldn't_. You just up and gave that flaming sword to them, and suddenly that empty space inside me felt just a bit less empty."

Aziraphale feels something in his chest tighten at the vulnerability in Crowley's tone, and all at once there is a veritable supernova of emotion crashing over him. He swallows thickly.

"Everything I knew was over, and then suddenly it wasn't. And you were there, and I just didn't know what to do with you because I loved you and it _burned_."

_Because how,_ Aziraphale knows, though Crowley doesn't speak it aloud, _how do you learn to love the stars again as they flicker to life inside the twilight of your soul?_ He knows this as surely as he knows Crowley himself, and what need is there for too many words when this starry stretch of grass they sit on in the cool-damp of the night says everything, absolutely everything?

The moment hangs suspended in time between them; he and Crowley watch one another, neither one wanting to break the silence that they hold so tenuously. Crowley is tense, and Aziraphale can feel it in the press of slender fingers against his own as they tighten minutely.

"Maybe it's stupid of me," he says at last. "Maybe there's no point to it, but I want to _be_ with you, Aziraphale. I want you for as long as I can possibly have you, in every way imaginable. Even in the human way."

There is a pause, and then Aziraphale realizes exactly what it is that he's asking.

"Crowley, are you…is this a proposal?"

He can't see well enough to say for certain, but the way Crowley twitches, as if he wants to curl in on himself and bury his face in his hands is evidence enough of the flush that has risen in his hollow cheeks. He doesn't turn away, though; he meets Aziraphale's wide eyes steadily with his own golden ones, luminescent in the night.

Crowley shifts so that he can clasp Aziraphale's hand between his own.

"Marry me. Here. Right now."

Aziraphale feels a sudden constricting in the muscles of his throat, and he blinks back the wetness that stings at the corners of his eyes.

"I suppose we can't very well marry in a church," he says, and a shaky laugh forces its way from his throat. He realizes after the humor falls flat that Crowley is watching him intently. He is wholly and entirely serious, and still waiting for an answer. A proper one.

"My darling, how could my answer be anything but yes?" he breathes, the words tripping over themselves as they hasten to escape the confines of nonexistence where they had first come into being so long, so very long ago.

_Yes, yes, a thousand times yes and even more than that, I have loved you since time itself began and perhaps even before that._

The night releases its long-held, pent-up breath, and Aziraphale is kissing Crowley with every ounce of his angelic might. It is awkward and there is little finesse in it, but Crowley kisses him back with equal fervor and he tastes like the wind through mist-damp trees and the white-hot tail of a meteor blazing through the atmosphere. In the calescence of their joined lips Aziraphale is sure he can feel the light of a thousand and one sunrises, of the one billion trillion stars blazing above them.

He feels the same overflowing warmth in the hands that scrabble at his waistcoat and tremble as they push the overcoat from his shoulders, and he feels it at length in the press of earthly skin on skin as they lay, bare and wanting, together.

It is natural, Aziraphale supposes as his shuddering exhalations lace the night. Crowley is and was the shaper of stars and galaxies. The same shaking, exhilarated hands that course over his body once lit the nuclear fires within the hearts of protostars and cradled them in their nebular nurseries as they condensed and combusted their way into existence. These are _his_ hands, and they are warm and beautiful and real. They are artisan's hands, the hands of God's finest craftsman. In him, this magnificent artificer of space and time, all of the energy in the Universe has been amassed into a single, radiant point of light that puts even the brightest and hottest blue supergiants to shame. Even hotter is his tongue, the press of his lips to white dwarf matter and _oh,_ Aziraphale thinks, _these are the tools with which he might break me apart and rebuild me if I ask it._

The Universe is their witness and the Earth sighs its blessing gently in the night as they entwine their sidereal souls in a matrimony more pure, more holy than any that had ever come before. They exist separately and together in the liminal space of the starlit nighttime, and she wraps them in the velvet-soft midnight ink of her cloak. They pledge themselves to each other and only each other, and perhaps another woman smiles as She tugs at the marionette strings of space and time around them.

Aziraphale can hardly tell where he begins and where Crowley ends, they are so deep in each other. It is only with great effort that he gasps: "Please, please tell me. I need to hear it from you."

"I love you, I love you," Crowley whispers against the very essence of him. "Like the stars – _fuck_, more than the stars, the Universe, _this_ is what you do to me."

* * *

They lay together while the dawn is still clad in mist and purple-gray hues, before she has begun to stretch excited pink fingers skyward. Later, they know, but not now, while they are still able to enjoy the wholeness of each other under a blanket miracled there sometime in the night. They kiss languidly, because they have all the time in the world to spend in matrimony.

And if the next week a sign goes up in the window of the bookshop that its owner is taking a vacation of indeterminate length, it has nothing to do with the lanky, unnervingly serpentine man who sits, surveying the clientele from behind stylish sunglasses while he pretends to read whatever Hawking text he's decided to prey upon that day. And if anyone takes note of the glint when he turns a page just so, one hand splayed carefully across the dust jacket, no one says a word.

And if a customer catches sight of the starlight-silver band that rests on Aziraphale's ring finger that certainly hadn't been there the week before, he merely smiles and says cryptically, "I hear Alpha Centauri is positively exquisite this time of year."


End file.
